Producing the domestic abroad: Diasporas in international relations.

摘要

This dissertation interrogates the role and increasing importance of diasporas as "newly valorized subjects" in the contemporary international system. It does so by developing the concept of a "domestic abroad," to capture a new, widespread form of transnationalism, produced through state policies and initiatives aimed at institutionalizing the relationship between nation-states and their diasporas. The rise of a domestic abroad in places as diverse as Mexico, China and India, an important phenomenon in its own right, also serves to pose anew many questions that are crucial to the discipline of International Relations (IR)---the nature of the nation-state, the erosion of state sovereignty, and the meaning and implications of globalization for the nation-state system. However, diasporas in general have only recently come to the attention of IR scholars and tend to elude the established theoretical frameworks of the discipline. In my dissertation I discuss the significance of the domestic abroad for international relations, register the inadequacy of existing theoretical frameworks, and then move to a critical engagement with two cross-disciplinary currents: postcolonial theory and historical materialism. The former, particularly in the more specific form of 'diaspora studies,' deals insightfully with diasporas as a critical site where the nation is [re]imagined. The latter provides a crucial understanding of the nature and importance of the state and of the evolving structures of global capitalism. By putting into conversation these two theoretical traditions, I argue that the production of the domestic abroad can be understood as an effect of two simultaneous, on-going processes: the diasporic re-imagining of the nation and the neoliberal restructuring of the state. I further argue that in order to understand what these processes mean, we need to analyze the historically produced, politically contingent relationship between the four elements of an ensemble consisting of nation, state, diasporas and global capitalism. In the latter half of the dissertation, I use this theoretical framework to explain the changing relationship between the postcolonial Indian nation-state and the 'Indian' diaspora---the on-going production of the Indian domestic abroad.